


nothing's gonna hurt me with my eyes shut

by calcifowl



Category: VIXX
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Lucid Dreaming, Night Terrors, Nightmares, Sleep Paralysis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-31
Updated: 2017-03-31
Packaged: 2018-10-13 06:25:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10508139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/calcifowl/pseuds/calcifowl
Summary: Hongbin screams and it wakes him up.





	

His lungs protest against the strain and it feels as if something has crawled inside him, a feral creature that is now refusing to let go of its prey, teeth sinking in. His throat is raw and it stings but he has to let it out, out of his body, out of his chest before it burns him from the inside. Hongbin screams and it wakes him up, and for a moment he’s disoriented, can’t find his own limbs. Then the room comes into view under a flash of light and it hurts his eyes and he’s in his bed. He’s safe, but the panic in his chest doesn’t leave him. _What’s wrong?_ His eyes are wild, his pupils dilated. His breathing comes in fast, and he can hear the blood rushing in his ears. _I don’t know._ Sleep takes him in the end but it’s not peaceful, and when he wakes up in the morning he’s still tired.

He’s tired and restless and he wants to turn in his bed but he can’t. He can’t sleep, but he can see the eyes looking at him from the window when he keeps very still, can hear the whispers under the bed when he holds his breath. He’s sweating, his head completely covered with his blankets, his hands cupped in front of his face, his breath hot against his skin. When he wakes up hours later he’s upside down in his bed, perfectly made, his head peeking out from under the blankets. They can get to him now. His bedroom is shrouded in deep shadow and he can feel them slithering under the bed, unseen—a hand reaching out to grab him, cold fingers thin as twigs that could easily break between his own—and he screams. There’s nothing there when the lights are on but a pair of old shoes, and his parents look at each other and sigh before turning it off again, his head completely covered again.

He’s in a library, rows and rows of books stretching out at his sides. He wanders. At some point he looks upwards, and the bookshelves keep going up, up, up towards the sky; there is no roof over his head, and no end to the books. His fingers run through the spines, almost touching but not quite. He can’t read them, not even the titles, but he can hear and smell hints of the stories hiding inside. There’s a sound of flapping wings overhead, almost a whisper, and he looks up and it’s not wings but pages; the books are rearranging themselves, flying around so delicately that they’re almost gliding, until a scratching sound starts at the end of the corridor behind his back. The books fall lifeless to the floor, and Hongbin starts running. The shelves are closing in, empty now and falling inwards, wanting to trap him, and he keeps running. When he wakes up he can’t run, or breathe, or move at all. His eyes are open, his legs sore, and he can still see the shelves trying to trap him but he can also see the lamp in his bedroom, the window. It’s not real, and he blinks until it goes away, the empty shelves slowly fading, disappearing from behind his eyelids. After a while he can breathe again, and his fingers move. 

He’s crawling on all fours, up through a set of stairs, and he doesn’t know or question why. He keeps going, everything around him changing, until he finds a door. The place looks familiar now, as if he’s been here before, or somewhere that looks a lot like this. The floor he’s standing on doesn’t exist, he knows that, and the darkness greets him from the other side when he opens the door. It closes softly behind his back, unprompted, and he can briefly see a mirror right in front of him; it looks old, stained near the corners. There’s a coat rack slightly to his left that he can’t see it in the dark, but he knows this somehow, knows it’s there in the corner just like he knows that there’s a hat hanging from it. A white owl is perched on top of the rack, watching. It stares at him as he goes further into the house, into a long room with a wall full of mirrors facing a wall made out of windows, a thin table stretching between from one side to the other, a chair on each end. He’s a bit hungry and when he turns there are grapes on the table, overflowing from a fruit bowl that must have been bronze at some point, and he steps around careful not to touch anything. He doesn’t know if you should eat in dreams. Outside the sun is setting, and he spends what feels like hours in that room before realising that he can’t see his reflection in the mirrors; that he can hear whispers coming from behind them, waiting to see what he does, can see a corridor opening on either side of the room where before there were none, and goes towards the one to his left. There’s a warm light coming from that one, and it draws him in. He’s been here before as well, he can tell, but the room it takes him to is different to the one he thinks he knows; the closet door is open and it leads to a new tiny room, warm and empty but for the armchair sitting at the centre, and Hongbin curls there like a cat and sleeps.

A wave of panic wakes him and he’s falling, falling, the darkness waiting under him, for him, and when the lights come on the upper half of his body is hanging over the side of his bed. He can’t see anything but his face is _right there_ and he can feel something moving in anticipation, and he screams until he can crawl back under the blankets.

Sometimes the pain helps. There are thorns embedded in his hands, and he knows he should take them out and wash them properly, soon, but he waits until right before going to bed before telling anyone. It helps knowing what’s real and what isn’t, sometimes.

It’s not the scream that wakes him this time, but the hand around his ankle. He opens his eyes and he knows where he is, he just _knows_ , and he thrashes and screams and kicks and tries to grab onto something with his hands. His knees are purple for a few days after that, and when he closes his hand around something it’s only a stuffed toy, but he feels his heart in his throat when he thinks about the moment in which his eyes opened and he found himself on the floor under his bed. He wonders if they will take him, someday, drag him towards the dark to never be seen before.

The scream bubbles in his throat, trying to get out. He can feel it when he wakes up. It almost sounds like a boiling kettle, and he keeps his mouth shut, breathes through it. He can see his room clearly almost as soon as his eyes open. It’s still dark, but he’s used to staring at his ceiling through the nights. Something moves to his left; he catches it with the corner of his eye, but pretends he doesn’t and slowly covers his head, holding his breath. He’s not a kid anymore, and morning will come.

Reading helps. It gives him something to do when he doesn’t sleep, but it also takes him to new places when he does. Sometimes he goes back to the room with the mirrors, always finds a way hidden somewhere. When it’s night outside and the stars shine only for him, he sits on the floor in front of the windows and looks until he falls asleep, until he wakes up. When he opens the door and the owl isn’t there, everything is different; the mirrors are silent and it’s dark outside, not a star in sight, and he stops going in when that happens. The hat isn’t there, either.

Bright eyes look at him from above. The owl is here again, and he feels safe. It sits atop a weeping willow in the middle of a dark garden, its branches so long that they almost reach the floor, and Hongbin crawls under them and sits there, waiting, breathing. He falls asleep and he wakes up in his bed, rested.

Music soothes him. Guitar and piano, mostly. A soft voice. Movies too, but they’re distracting, and music is not. Some nights he leaves it on in his room, volume as low as it can go, until it lulls him to sleep.

He doesn’t wake up screaming anymore, hasn’t for years now. He doesn’t have nightmares, usually, at least not ones that he remembers, but he can’t move around as he did either. He can’t remember his dreams most days. Sometimes, he doesn’t sleep. He doesn’t fight it, not anymore, but it only comes when it wants to. Some nights he’s glad; others not so much, when he’s so tired that he can barely keep his eyes open. Sometimes he lies down for a bit, in the middle of the day, just to rest his eyes, and doesn’t wake up until almost a whole day has passed; others he grabs a book when he gets home, or watches something on his laptop until he has to start getting ready for work again, and doesn’t even try to sleep until it’s well past midnight and he can feel his body giving up on him. Some nights he doesn’t feel anything as he lies there thinking about his life, and wonders if they did get him in the end, if they finally managed to drag him under the bed and what’s left now is just a shell, a memory of his old self. Some nights he hears an owl calling in the distance, and he falls into a dreamless sleep almost immediately.

**Author's Note:**

> title is from eyes shut by years & years


End file.
